


Waking

by sheafrotherdon



Series: Exhaustion [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Comfort, Heartbreak, M/M, Post-Movie: The Old Guard (2020)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26322544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: When Joe wakes, it's barely dawn.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Exhaustion [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1912660
Comments: 40
Kudos: 375





	Waking

When Joe wakes, it’s barely dawn, the light in their bedroom soft and grey. Nicky’s sprawled out on his stomach beside him, one hand tucked under Joe’s shoulder, the other under his own pillow, and Joe watches him for a moment. It’s quiet and still and he’s tucked against the man he loves and yet something’s wrong – enough to make his hindbrain itch with the memory of something he’s forgetting.

It slams into him a half-second later. 

Booker. 

Everything that happened was because of Booker.

Joe scrubs his hands over his face before slowly, gently sliding out of bed and heading down the hall to the bathroom. He takes a leak, washes his hands, and idly studies his face in the mirror as he does so. He looks tired and he feels nauseated, his stomach tipping the more he thinks about what Booker did, about the gap between what he thought he knew and what was real. Sighing, he heads back to the bedroom, meaning to get dressed, but Nicky’s awake, lying on his side and blinking at him drowsily, and Joe feels such a wave of need for him, for his grounding touch, that he climbs back in beside him.

“What’s the matter?” Nicky asks, frowning.

Joe shakes his head. “Everything.” 

Nicky gives him a small smile. “That’s a lot.” He pauses, chewing on the inside of his lip. “Booker?”

Joe pulls in a long breath, lets it out equally as slowly. “I hate him.”

Nicky raises an eyebrow. “That is a lie.”

Joe closes his own eyes for a moment. 

“If you hated him, you would have expected his betrayal.” Nicky presses a hand over Joe’s heart. “You would not feel this anguish.”

Joe covers Nicky’s hand with his own. “I want to hate him.”

Nicky lets out a soft huff of breath. “That I understand. I want to hate him, too.” 

“But we can’t.”

“No.” Nicky presses his lips to Joe’s forehead for a long moment. “He is our family.”

Joe’s filled with so many feelings – rage, disgust, helplessness. For the first time in a long time he can feel the weight of a terrible keening at his center. He wants to break down, to press his face into Nicky’s shoulder and shake apart with the way this feels. Joe can catalog so many injuries – all the ways he’s died, the searing pain of blades and fire, of bones splintering, breaking, being crushed. None of it compares to the constriction around his heart.

“Perhaps we failed him,” Nicky says softly, and that’s a match to the tinder of Joe’s anger.

“Fuck that,” he spits. “ _Fuck_ that. He is a grown ass man who chose to try and solve a problem by sentencing us all.”

“Joe.”

“You died! You died right in front of me, and would have died again.”

“Cara . . .”

“And the pain,” Joe says, and his breathing hitches. “You were in such pain.” 

Nicky pulls him in at that, and he does shake apart, and Nicky kisses the crown of his head over and over, whispers, “my love, my love.” Joe holds on tightly, feels desperate, like he might shatter if he doesn’t press himself as close to Nicky as he can get, and Nicky just bears it, holds him together, whispers things that Joe can’t even hear over the roaring in his ears, the terrible beating of his own heart.

It passes, as all things must, and when Joe’s breathing evens out again Nicky shifts just enough to kiss his forehead, his damp face, his lips. “My Yusuf,” he says as he pulls away, and Joe can see Nicky’s own eyes are bright.

They are centuries past the point of apologizing for their feelings, centuries past being embarrassed to be overwhelmed. “Tell me,” he says.

Nicky watches him, a long, quiet pause. “I do not know where to begin,” he offers. “Except that my heart is in pieces.”

It’s Joe’s turn to kiss him, to tug up the blankets around their shoulders as they lie side by side, aching, every breath riven with shards of glass. “It’s still early,” Joe says. “Perhaps we don’t begin quite yet.”

Nicky offers him a small smile. “Perhaps.” And he tips his head forward to press his brow to Joe’s, and Joe only closes his eyes once Nicky closes his. They clasp hands, and despite all the _whys_ and _what ifs_ hammering inside Joe’s skull, he falls asleep, and dreams of a meal shared with family, and a soccer game on television before the impact of a grenade.


End file.
